Welcome to my About Me page!
I realize this is an important page for all the visitors that come to this website, because, frankly, you want to know who I am and why I created this website. My name is Kenneth Merrick. I am a licensed insurance agent for ELITE FINANCIAL FREEDOM. One of the things we do is to educate people we meet about how important financial literacy is for everyone. We are bound by our license as fiduciaries to do what is best for our clients.
I am a babyboomer that was given bad advise as a W2 employee years ago. Once I retired from my W2 position I realized I didn’t want that to happen to other people. This has led me to get my license as a financial professional. This is why I am so passionate about making sure all the people I talk to get the best information available. The following is my story, how I started, and why.
I had lost money earlier in my career when the Y2K scare evaporated much of the money I had in my first 401(K) in Texas. The Internet bubble that followed made some individuals wealthy, but only added to my losses in the market. I decided then that I should have followed my Dad’s advise, save 10% of every paycheck I earned.
I retired as a direct mail printer in 2023, at 65 years old. All I had was a 401(K) retirement account. I had to jump through a couple of hoops in order to get our fund manager to release the funds to my self-directed IRA account.
The sad bit to all this was a few things that I guess a lot of retiree’s go through when they retire. For 1, a month preceding my official retirement, the stock market had a correction. My funds were invested in the high risk Equity markets. My fund balance lost $4000 almost overnight, and a few more thousands before I could get the hemorrhaging to stop! The last month of my employment the stock market started doing a roller-coaster ride of up and down, mainly just going down. I started contemplating not retiring and stay invested but, what happens to what I have left if the market continues to fall?
The last ten or so years preceding my retirement the markets were up, sometimes in double digits, so you can only imagine the horror I was going through seeing some of my retirement funds evaporating. I made the decision to get out of the stock market before it all tanked, and looked toward my retirement.
After I retired, my wife who is younger than I, also decided to retire. We did some traveling, paid off some vehicle loans, and took a long look at my little nest egg. I knew that before I retired that I would need to earn some kind of income. My nest egg wasn’t large enough to last until I died, unless I was going to die in a couple of months.
I decided that I would get into real estate investing. You know the drill; buy a property in foreclosure, fix it and then sell it at a discount. That was the plan. I had hired a mentor that would help me select a property to buy. I would only buy pretty houses, the properties that didn’t need a lot of repairs. I could do the little things necessary to sell the property quickly.
That plan was a good plan; However, the banks were not as accommodating as they once were. So then we had another plan. My wife and I decided maybe it would be better to just sell our house and have an estate sale and relocate out of the United States. It would be much cheaper to live in another country.
That was what we started doing. We were selling things and they were moving quickly. Then, out of the blue, my wife’s sister told my wife to come see this house that was up for sell around the corner from where she lived. That was a mistake, because my wife fell in love with the house. It was around the corner from her sister’s house, a much nicer and newer house than the one I was selling. Needless to say, we didn’t relocate out of the country. We relocated to Baton Rouge, LA. Just across the Mississippi River from where we lived.
After we moved into the new house, shortly thereafter our Realtor invited me to a BPM, (business presentation meeting) with one of her customers. She said it was a possible business opportunity. It turned into an eye-opening experience. I learned so much from their presentation that I was hooked! I knew a lot (I thought) about financing, interest rates, investing. I knew very little about insurance, just enough to know I didn’t like insurance companies.
What I knew about financing was just the surface of a whole new industry I never knew existed before. I was learning things I only thought I knew. This was incredible! But you know what the most eye-opening tragedy was? What I learned about the 401(K) accounts made my heart skip a beat.
What I learned was had I taken my new 401(K) account in 2003 and reinvested it into a Life insurance IUL policy, I would have never lost money in the stock market. In fact, it would have been compounding interest for 20 + years. I would still be earning interest on that money!
An IUL is short for Indexed Universal Life, which is a life insurance policy that follows the index you choose and mirrors the index as it rises in value. It will rise in value that the cap rate dictates, for example 12%, but never lose value, so your money will either grow or stay the same, but never ever lose money!
So this is why I am an insurance agent. This is why my passion is to teach as many people I know to don’t do what I did, do what I say! Remember, they don’t teach financial literacy in school. They try to get college bound students borrowing money to go to school – enslaving them into debt before they finish school!
I hope that I can help as many people avoid not having money to retire on. It is sad to see so many young adults not investing into themselves, or protecting their incomes. Like my Dad always told me, “Son, do as I say, not as I do.”
Some people will think if I only have two and one-half years as a financial strategist I don’t know as much as an agent with twenty years of experience. That is probably true in some instances. But as far as the majority of agents selling insurance I know as much or more than they do. Why do I say that? The majority of agents are writing policies that pay a higher commission than what is best for their clients.
Don’t get me wrong. Not all agents are bad. There are a great number of agents, like myself, that are doing the best for their clients. When I meet an individual I try to to get to know the person, their thoughts, their dreams, and their goals. I want the best for the individual, even if they choose to work with another agent. I want everyone to know what I know so they can make the best financial decisions that relates to them personally.
In the end, I hope to make up for my colorful past I lived, and strive to make a difference in peoples lives that I get to know. In closing, my intentions are to help you, my website visitor, in creating a better financial future for the ones you love and that you succeed in reaching your goals!